Dylan seen from inside out

Son finishes father’s memoir of being protective sidekick of folk legend in early days

Victor Maymudes, a longtime member of Bob Dylan’s inner circle who had fallen out with Dylan later in life and died shortly after, with Dylan in 1964 in Woodstock, N.Y. (EDWARD A. CHAVEZ / The New York Times)

LOS ANGELES — On a bright, cool afternoon in July, Jacob Maymudes sat on the deck of the small guesthouse he rents in the Los Feliz neighbourhood here, reflecting on the strange journey of his first book, Another Side of Bob Dylan, which will be published Sept. 9 and has already excited interest.

“It was never my intention to write a book about Bob,” he said, summoning up the difficult period in his life when he resisted completing the memoir left unfinished by his father, Victor Maymudes, a longtime member of Dylan’s inner circle who had bitterly fallen out with him in 1997 and died four years later, leaving behind 24 hours of taped reminiscences.

Now 34, Jake grew up long after the Dylan legend had been formed, but he comes honestly to his casual “Bob.” He was seven when he first met Dylan, at the back lot of Universal Studios. Jake was with his father, who was continually on the road with Dylan, carrying out an assortment of essential backstage assignments: as tour manager, chauffeur and body man, not to mention chess-playing companion.

They were roles he had been playing, off and on, since the early 1960s, when he was known as Dylan’s protective sidekick: together with him in London for Dylan’s first overseas concert; in a Manhattan hotel suite for a marijuana-infused summit with the Beatles; in Malibu, where Dylan’s first wife, Sara, is said to have poured out her marital troubles to Jake’s mother, Linda Wylie, while the unreleased Blood on the Tracks played on the stereo and Dylan suddenly walked in.

Not quite six years older than Dylan, Victor, an imposing, dark-haired six-footer, was an established figure on the folk scene — a promoter, manager and club owner in Los Angeles — when he came to New York and met the singer in 1961 or 1962.

The two instantly connected, and as Dylan’s career took off, Victor moved in and out of his orbit —drifting away to pursue projects of his own but always circling back to Dylan.

“He was perceived as the keeper of the secrets,” said David Hajdu, a music historian whose book Positively 4th Street describes the early ’60s folk scene. “His reputation was for being enigmatic, closemouthed, trustworthy, impenetrable.”

Victor’s presence at the creation mattered to Dylan, said Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian and author of Bob Dylan in America, a 2010 best-seller. “It’s a sense of loyalty, of kinship,” he said. “You were brothers together. You were scuffling. That’s why Dylan brought him back.”

Brought him back even after an episode involving a teenage girl that led to Victor’s being fired as tour manager in 1995. Another star might have banished him. Instead, Dylan had Victor scout for and look after his real estate holdings. A quarrel over one property caused the final, acrimonious break in 1997.

In 2000, Victor, who was flat broke, signed a book contract with St. Martin’s Press and began speaking into a tape recorder. A year later, he died of an aneurysm, at 65. The unfinished book became another mythic item in the ever-expanding “Dylanology,” and curiosity grew.

“What will he reveal?” as Hajdu put it.

It was a question Jake was in no rush to answer. He was still troubled by his father’s death and the sense that Victor had placed his needs above those of Jake and his family.

Then, in January 2013, a fire destroyed the New Mexico house where Wylie had been living. Although long estranged from Victor, she had kept his ashes in a box. It was incinerated in the blaze, and only the ashes, and the tapes, seemed to remain of Victor.

“The whole idea was to write this homage to my father,” Jake, who has a career in visual effects in film and TV, recalled of his decision to finish his father’s work. “Everything else burned up.”

He put an hour of raw audio on YouTube, and “quickly I got 400 hits in a day,” he said. Biographers, journalists and fans got in touch, urging him to release the other 23 hours or to turn them into a book.

Jake diligently transcribed the tapes and sent material off to his father’s publisher but got a firm rejection. OK, then, he would publish the book himself. But a Kickstarter campaign fell far short of the $45,000 goal, even after an article in Rolling Stone brought in fresh donations.

With the guidance of an agent, Jake tried again, piecing together his father’s free-form tales and cross-checking the jumble of incidents against books like Clinton Heylin’s Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments Day by Day 1941-1995. This time, when he tried St. Martin’s he got a contract.

Another Side of Bob Dylan is an unusual addition to the giant Dylan oeuvre, the quirky stepchild of Dylan’s own looping narratives. One thread explores Victor’s adventures in Sunset Strip bohemia. In the 1950s, he was a co-founder of the Unicorn, a club that attracted the likes of Lenny Bruce and Marlon Brando. In the ’60s and ’70s, Victor palled with Dennis Hopper, going to Peru to help build sets and scout locations (and ingest mountains of cocaine) for Hopper’s ill-starred 1971 epic, The Last Movie.

The second narrative is an intimate, conversational account of Victor’s tempestuous friendship with Dylan. It included designing and building a house in New Mexico for Dylan in the ’70s. Later, Victor bought and fitted out the tour bus Dylan used on his Never Ending Tour in the 1980s and '90s.

But the most vivid passages go back further — to 1964, the pivotal year when Dylan broke out of the East Coast folkie bubble and made a cross-country journey. Victor took the wheel of a blue Ford station wagon, also joined by folk musician Paul Clayton and journalist Peter Karman.

“It was a group of friends, all in the know, a nucleus of hip in America,” Wilentz said of the 1964 tour. “It was something special. The civil rights movement was going on.”

The stops included a visit to poet Carl Sandburg, in North Carolina, and a stay in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, where Dylan was denied entrance to a blacks-only bar. Back on the road, they heard early Beatles hits on the car radio, and Dylan feverishly scrawled lyrics in a spiral notebook.

The first inkling of Dylan’s new fame came in London that May, when he performed at the Royal Festival Hall to an audience much larger than he normally drew in America. Victor draped his large frame over Dylan as they slipped through the ecstatic crowd.

Fresh from this triumph, the pair vacationed in Vouliagmeni, Greece, on the Mediterranean. “I explored the coast and swam in the sea,” Victor recalls, while Dylan stayed in the hotel, “typing and handwriting between smoking cigarettes, and he can do that for longer than anybody I know.”

Returning to New York, they rushed to a studio, and Dylan “blurted it all out,” running through 11 new songs, “one after another without rehearsing.”

Improbable though this account seems, it squares with the one in Howard Sounes’ book Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, which describes a single six-hour session, lubricated by Beaujolais, that resulted in the album Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan’s farewell at age 23 to the blues-inflected folk idiom he had conquered. Two songs — Chimes of Freedom and My Back Pages, with its soaring refrain, “Ah, but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now” — signaled the next, visionary phase in Dylan’s work.

Later that summer, he was invited to meet the Beatles at the Delmonico Hotel. The Dylan entourage brought along some marijuana. Dylan sat down to roll a joint, as Victor and others have reported, but he proved all thumbs, and Victor expertly took command.

It was the first quality weed the Beatles had smoked, but the giddy conversation went on without Dylan. Exhausted from a string of late nights and a few drinks, “he passed out on the floor!” Victor remembers.

Not that the book is an exercise in skeleton rattling or score settling. On the contrary, Victor reverently speaks of Dylan’s “greatness” and “genius” and rejoices in the “magical mystery tour” Dylan opened up for him — even as he remained curiously remote. The book suggests that the closer one got to Dylan, the more unknowable he became. (Dylan’s representatives did not respond to email and phone requests for comment for this article.)

Throughout, Victor is grateful for the many favours Dylan did him, like bringing him back into the fold, no questions asked, when Victor had run out of money in the ’80s and needed a paycheque. “You’re hired!” he remembers Dylan saying.

Jake, too, reveres Dylan. When I went to see him, choice memorabilia were carefully laid out on his bed: set lists from Dylan’s tours, stray notebook jottings in Dylan’s hand, as well as a hilariously vituperative letter the singer apparently drafted, on hotel stationery in Tokyo, to a music journalist back home.

There was also the guest book from the memorial for Victor at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica in 2001. Tom Petty, Jackson Browne and filmmaker Paul Mazursky all signed it. Dylan did not attend, Jake is certain, although Jake’s sister, Aerie, told me that a slight figure in a hoodie, Dylan’s usual garb, slipped into the proceedings and left just as quietly.

Next, we climbed into Jake’s secondhand SUV, bought with a portion of his $70,000 book advance, and headed to the 18th Street Coffee House in Santa Monica. Part of a larger complex purchased by Dylan in the mid-1990s, it was designed and built by Victor.

“I helped nail the roof, put up these poles, laid the brick,” Jake said. He worked there as a teenager, and Aerie briefly managed the place, until, as has been reported by Sounes and now Jake, losses in the first year totaled almost $100,000. Aerie was told she would be dismissed.

“I told him he needed to fire me himself,” she recalled last week, referring to Dylan. “And that’s what happened.” Dylan came by, she recalled, and brusquely let her go. Victor, who witnessed the incident, “quit that instant,” Jake writes. He sued Dylan for retirement funds, and the friendship was never repaired.

“All he had to do was apologize to Aerie and all of this would be different,” Victor told Jake.

And yet Jake has fond memories of the coffeehouse: Dylan and Victor playing wordless games of chess; Ray Mancini showing up for sparring sessions with Dylan at the private boxing club in back; Jake sneaking into Dylan’s office to find fresh pages, typed on both sides, and with no margins, sitting alongside the old-fashioned typewriter.

“He was always nice to me,” Jake said of the man he grew up thinking of as his father’s boss. And except for the Merit cigarettes Jake bummed at age 15, “I never asked anything of him either.”